In an environment for centralized management of desktops, multiple client machines may receive access to or execute a computing environment based on copies of a single “golden master” desktop disk image. A machine disk image or desktop disk image may be an image of an operating system (OS), and may include sets of applications and customizations representing a working environment for a user.
In some environments, a machine image includes files used to execute a client machine that then executes an operating system or other user applications. In other environments, a desktop image includes files used to execute an operating system or other user applications, and either a physical machine or a virtual machine may execute the desktop image. An image of a machine or desktop may be generally referred to as a base disk image. The base image disk may also be referred to as a virtual image disk and is based on a virtual disk configuration.
Current machine streaming provisioning is limited to streaming one virtual disk image at a time. The one virtual disk image includes the operating system, applications data and user settings.
A virtual disk assignment change to the operating system, applications data or user settings effects the entire virtual disk and requires a reboot at the client device. For a customer to prepare a golden image of their client device the virtual disk needs to have the latest operating system update, and the latest applications data update all together. This presents a burden to the customer since there is no flexibility in separating the operating system, applications data and user data within a single virtual disk.
In a virtual machine, it is common practice to enumerate a virtual disk with the assistance of a hypervisor. A virtual disk can surface to a virtual machine through a hypervisor management backend. However, there are several shortcomings. One shortcoming is that remote adding and removing a virtual disk does not apply to a physical machine. Another shortcoming is that the virtual disk file needs to be distributed completely in hypervisor storage before the virtual disk can be presented to the virtual machine, which could incur a long wait time.